As there is a noble way of being discontented, so there is a_Atlantic Classics

content. The Contented Heart is not a phrase to soothe us, but a power

to work results. It must constantly emerge upon a higher plane, or it

will fall. Few of us would be willing to retain just the personal habits

that we have now. Sir Gilbert Elliot drove his sister out of her

literary inertia when he bet gloves to ribbons that she could not write

a modern ballad on the _Flowers of the Forest_. The result is one of the

most popular songs of Scotland. There is also a sham content whose

practitioners often get their 'cumuppances' as effectively as did Thomas

Raikes. The Duchess of York led him about her garden, where was a

menagerie crowded with eagles and some favorite macaws. A herd of

kangaroos and ostriches appeared and a troop of monkeys. Next morning a

kangaroo and a macaw strolled into Raikes's bedroom. He was too much of

a courtier to tell his terror. At breakfast he said, 'If I like one

creature more than another it is a kangaroo, while there is nothing so

good for a bedroom sentinel as a strong-legged macaw.' The good Duchess

smiled pleasantly and put Raikes down in her will for two macaws.

A certain kind of content enlivens us with the bliss of others'

ignorance. Tacitus was one of the first historians in our modern sense,

yet he described a motionless frozen sea in the north from which a hiss

is heard as the sun plunges down into it at night; and Pliny noted that

the reflection of mirrors is due to the percussion of the air thrown

back upon the eyes. Kipling laughed slyly at the traveler in India who

spent his time gazing at the names of the railway stations in Baedeker.

When the train rushed through a station he would draw a line through the

name and say, 'I've done that.' Satisfaction with our learning is

confined to no age or nation. Two Frenchmen in a restaurant showing off

their English opined, 'It deed rain to-morrow.' 'Yes, it was.'

Satisfaction with virtue was rebuked by Francis de Sales when he told

the nuns, who asked to go barefoot, to keep their shoes and change their

brains. Satisfaction with our importance recalls Harlequin, who when

asked what he was doing on his paper throne replied that he was

reigning. Satisfaction with our future is the satisfaction of the eighth

square of the chessboard where we shall all be queens together, and it's

all feasting and fun.

I would not, as advocate of the Contented Heart, go so far as Walt

Whitman when he said that whoever was without his volume of poems should

be assassinated; but his remark suggests that extreme measures are

frequently curative. Stanislaus of Poland did not hesitate to recall to

his daughter the bad days they had undergone. 'See, Marie, how

Providence cares for good people: you had not even a chemise in 1725,

and now you are Queen of France.' To take up Dante and read about devils

boiled in pitch must by comparison cheer morbid humans. The spectacle of

tragedy in the lives of kings and favorites of the gods such as the

Greek stage presented was believed to be wholesome because beholders

thereby faced a scale of misfortune so much exceeding anything in their

own lives that their mishaps appeared of slight importance in

comparison. I know that after seeing _OEdipus Rex_ given by the three

Salvinis and others in the old amphitheatre in Fiesole, I went off

murmuring, 'What does it matter if my trunk is lost!' a state of mind to

which no slighter argument had sufficed to bring me. Surely life is too

interesting to spend it all knocking off its pretty scallops by aimless

exaggeration of small troubles, or hanging out our large ones to flap

the passer-by. Besides which, we get no more sympathy from the passer-by

than did Giant Despair who sometimes, in sunshiny weather, fell into

fits.

Captivating as a 'born,' a fortuitous, untrained content may be, trained

content is of a finer type. One is quantity content, the other quality

content. Not to smash things up and make them over just as we want them,

which we should like to do but cannot; not to waste our time fighting

against conditions, but to take up those conditions, that environment,

and out of them forge the _oes triplex_ of a contented heart--that, I

take it, is to be an adept in the fine art of living, and I for one am

votary.

That the most restless heart can train itself to find content in simple,

commonplace things, like work, nature, health, books, meditation, and

friends,--illustrations are bewilderingly abundant. Burne-Jones said he

would like to stay right in his own house for numberless years, the hope

of getting on with his painting was happiness enough. Macaulay would

'rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who

did not love reading'; and King James said that if he were not a king he

would be a university man, and if it were so that he must be a prisoner

he would desire no other durance than to be chained in the Bodleian

Library with so many noble authors. Carlyle's chief luxury was 'to think

and smoke tobacco, with a new clay pipe every day, put on the doorstep

at night for any poor brother-smoker or souvenir-hunter to carry away.'

All Diogenes wanted was that Alexander and his men should stand from

between him and the sun. Goethe found content in Nature and earnest

activity; and the happy Turk told Candide that he had twenty acres of

land which he cultivated with his children, work which put them far from

great evils: ennui, vice, and need,--'Il faut cultiver notre jardin.'

Diocletian, one of the cleverest of the Roman emperors, reigned

twenty-two years and then retired to private life in Dalmatia, building,

planting, and gardening. Solicited by Maximian to resume the imperial

purple, he replied that if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he

had planted with his own hands he would no longer be urged to relinquish

his enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power. Fanny Kemble lived

all summer in the Alps, the guides describing her exquisitely as the

lady who goes singing over the mountains. Pedaretus, being left out of

the election of the three hundred, went home merry, saying that it did

him good to find there were three hundred better than himself in the

city. St. Augustine on his thirty-third birthday gave his friends a

moderate feast followed by a three days' discussion of the Happy Life.

Bunyan wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_ not to please his neighbors, but

his own self to satisfy; in prison, too.

Catherine of Siena, whatever her sufferings, was always jocund, 'ever

laughing in the Lord.' The blind Madame du Deffand rejoiced that her

affliction was not rheumatism; Spurgeon's receipt for contentment was

never to chew pills, but to swallow the disagreeable and have done with

it; Darwin's comfort was that he had never consciously done anything to

gain applause; and Jefferson never ceased affirming his belief in the

satisfying power of common daylight, common pleasures, and all the

common relations of life. Essipoff, when commiserated on the smallness

of her hands, insisted that longer ones would be cumbersome. Robert

Schauffler's specific for a blue Monday is to whistle all the Brahms

tunes he can remember. Dr. Cuyler, when very ill, replied to a

relative's suggestion of the glorious company waiting him above, 'I've

got all eternity to visit with those old fellows; I am in no hurry to

go'; and old Aunt Mandy, when asked why she was so constantly cheerful,

replied, 'Lor', chile, I jes' wear this world like a loose garment.'

Acts, all these, the flinging out of hand or tongue against adverse

fortune. The brain can do it, too. One of the most remarkable statements

I ever heard is Mary Antin's that she never had a dull hour in her life.

Now, outside things, doings, could not so have thrilled her days. Her

spirit kept dullness distant. On the rafters of Montaigne's tower-room

was written in Greek, 'It is not so much things that torment man as the

opinion that he has of things.' Our opinions then make the contented or

the discontented heart. Coleridge affirmed the shaping power of

imagination to be so vitally human that the joy of life consists in it.

Haydon's chief pleasure was 'feeding on his own thoughts.' 'Make for

yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts,' Ruskin urged. 'Whether God gave

the Venetians St. Mark's bones does not matter,' he says elsewhere, 'but

he gave them real joy and peace in their imagined treasure, more than we

have in our real ones.' Lord Rosebery urges people to garden in winter

in the imagination. Stevenson writes of the ease and pleasure of travels

in the calendar and a voyage in the atlas; and Keats thought that a man

might pass a very pleasant life by reading certain pages of poetry and

wandering with them and musing and dreaming upon them.

It is the mood that makes the contented heart, just as the eye makes the

horizon, and we ourselves make the light that we see things by. Clothes

warm us only by keeping our own heat in. 'Everyone is well or ill at

ease,' says Epictetus, 'according as he finds himself; not he whom the

world believes but himself believes to be so is content.' To be

concrete, take riches. 'Greedy fools,' sings the modern poet,

'Measure themselves by poor men never;

Their standard being still richer men

Makes them poor ever.'

The rich man is merely one who has something to spare; and the really

poor one he who has nothing over. If you can give anything you are rich.

Try it. An old man tells me how Mark Hopkins used to examine the boys in

the Westminster Catechism: 'What is the chief end of man?' 'To glorify

God and enjoy him forever.' 'Well,' he burst forth, 'why don't you do it

then?' It is not conceit, but hygiene of the soul, to 'enjoy one's

self,' taking the conventional phrase literally. The trick of happiness,

says Walt Whitman, is to tone down your wants and tastes low enough;

and Stevenson puts in his say that the true measure of success is

appreciation: 'I stand more in need of a deeper sense of contentment

with life than of knowledge of the Bulgarian tongue.' What would the

possession of a thousand a year avail, asks Thackeray, to one who was

allowed to enjoy it only with the condition of wearing a shoe with a

couple of nails in it?

Take knowledge, not to be confounded with wisdom,--'I have none,' sang

Keats's thrush, 'and yet the evening listens.' It did not hurt Horace

if others be

As there is a noble way of being discontented, so there is an ignoble